Figures must have their own light, it wasn’t light that struck the figure in a certain way—the light itself, the luminosity was in the figure. It emanated from the paint itself.
Nathan Oliveira, in Peter Selz, Nathan Oliveira (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 37.
Painting from a live model was more than just a formal exercise in line and light for Nathan Oliveira; it was the part of his practice that connected him across time and filled his studio with the energy of a living being. “This is about us and nature, us as a part of nature.”1 Indeed, painting from a live model offered a link between the artist and the history of art: “It is something artists have shared over centuries.”2 The model was a spirited, not static, partner in Oliveira’s process. “I don’t seek to replicate the reality of the human figure, but to reach behind that, to a different reality born out of the language of gesture and the fluidity of the material that I use.”3
Nathan Oliveira, in Kathan Brown, Why Draw a Live Model? (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 1997), 17. ↩︎
Nathan Oliveira, in Kathan Brown, Why Draw a Live Model? (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 1997), 17. ↩︎
Nathan Oliveira, in Kathan Brown, Why Draw a Live Model? (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 1997), 9. ↩︎
Nathan Oliveira was a keen observer of birds. The hawks and falcons that soared above the foothills near Stanford’s campus captured the artist’s imagination. When one of Oliveira’s students gave him a stuffed kestrel discarded from the Stanfords ornithological collection, the artist began using it as a model, creating realistic studies in watercolor, gouache, and oil.1 He collected feathers and various species of taxidermied birds. At one point, a nest of kestrels inhabited a neighboring studio at Stanford; “One day,” described Oliveira, “while at the easel, I noticed something fly down past my shoulder and sit on the floor. It was a small kestrel, which had entered my space through an opening in the studio wall. It was exhausted, and there I stood, eyeball to eyeball, with this magnificent creature.”2 Beginning in 1970, Oliveira became preoccupied with raptors as a subject matter. By the 1980s, he produced increasingly abstract images of wings, which culminated in the “Windhover” paintings—a series of large-scale meditative abstractions on flight made in the 1980s and 90s.3
Hilarie Faberman, Nathan Oliveira: “The Windhover”: Recent Wing Paintings and Related Works (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1995), 2. ↩︎
Nathan Oliveira, in Peter Selz, Nathan Oliveira (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 98. ↩︎
The Windhover Project: The Wings of Nathan Oliveira’s Mind, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, video, 4:41 minutes, available at sfmoma.org/watch/the-windhover-project-the-wings-of-nathan-oliveiras-mind/. ↩︎
During the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area, Nathan Oliveira was studying figure painting. It was 1950, and he was taking a summer course with German expressionist Max Beckmann at Mills College in Oakland. Beckmann was hugely influential on the young artist, who would recall his teacher’s primary advice: “more black.”1 Uninterested in current trends, “Beckmann symbolized the old world” and encouraged Oliveira to “deal with reality.”2 He was most enthusiastic about Oliveira’s work during class sessions with models, encouraging the development of isolated figures in atmospheric washes of paint.3 By the time Oliveira joined the painting faculty at California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Institute of Art) in 1956, along with Frank Lobdell and Richard Diebenkorn, Abstract Expressionism had fallen out of favor: “It was like the aftermath of a great party . . . and we all had to clean up.”4 There, amid “a spirit of resurrection,”5 Oliveira forged his own style bridging traditional figure painting with the primacy of the artist’s gesture.
Nathan Oliveira, in Peter Selz, Nathan Oliveira (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 20. See also Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 101. ↩︎
Nathan Oliveira, in Peter Selz, Nathan Oliveira (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 21 and 20. ↩︎
Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 101. ↩︎
Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 102. ↩︎
Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 102. ↩︎
Printmaking was an important foundation and, at times, a retreat for painter Nathan Oliveira. He studied lithography with masters like Max Beckmann and Leon Goldin and later taught it at California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts). In 1952 Oliveira’s black and orange lithograph based on a Portuguese bullfight was reproduced in Life magazine, and his work was included in the Second International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1952; in 1957 his first solo exhibition featured only lithography. It was through printmaking that he found his artistic voice, producing powerfully expressive figures like the bull, the big-eyed ant in his noteworthy print Death of an Ant (1956), and the isolated human, for which the artist is best known.1 In the early 1960s, after a deluge of art-world success and demand for his work, Oliveira hit a dry spell. Depressed and unable to paint, the artist turned to printmaking, taking a fellowship at Tamarind Lithography Workshop to find his footing. When he joined the Stanford University art faculty in 1964, he established a printmaking program. During the Vietnam War, students used his printshop to make antiwar posters sold to benefit activists; Oliveira’s own antiwar poster depicted a figure hovering in dark space with the inscription: “Human and political differences are no longer enough reason for hate and its poison . . . If there is to be dignity and quality of existence for all mankind, let it begin.”2
Nathan Oliveira envied the freedom of birds in flight, soaring high above and seemingly detached from earth. In the mid-1980s, the artist began exploring the shape of a bird wing as a metaphor for the mind: “The catenary curve can become the circular curve of the earth. I want to show how the mind can transport itself beyond the barriers of the ground.”1 On large canvases—the scale reflecting the grandness of their spiritual nature—Oliveira painted wings with zoological precision and vigorous brushwork, refining and abstracting the concept of flight.
Hilarie Faberman, Nathan Oliveira: “The Windhover”: Recent Wing Paintings and Related Works (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1995), 3. ↩︎
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